12

“Do you want me to grab your hair again?” Mindy threatened, towering over her. “If you don’t show up, it might seem like an admission of guilt. Here’s what I say you do. Dominic said he wants to take you to a charity carnival. There is no doubt in my mind that Mark and Laura will be there also. I’ll dress you up in a dark wig. I’ll also find you some brown contacts. You’ll be Cleopatra by the time I’m finished with you and no one will dare think that you are the same person as Helen. You’ll be in the clear if you can manage to trick them into believing that you’re a completely different person. You can pull it off, can’t you?”

Helen started to see things from Mindy’s perspective during her speech. Mindy was right. She should grab the bull by the horns and deal with it.

“Okay!” Helen said, gathering up all her energy. “When is the date?”

Mindy looked at her watch. “You’re supposed to meet him at the front gate at two o’clock this afternoon. It’s ten now. Get in the shower,” Mindy ordered, pushing her. “You’d better be out in exactly ten minutes. It’s not like you have any hair to wash and that’s just enough time to shave your legs. Move it!”

Helen had a shower and did everything else Mindy told her to do. Today, Mindy decided that Helen was going to wear a yellow sweater with white jeans. She would wear a heavy white belt over her sweater. To top it off, Mindy also gave her a pair of white witch boots with wicked ten centimeter heels.

“Don’t trip,” she said coldly as she set them by the door for Helen.

Mindy wasn’t kidding when she said she needed all four hours. She used almost every moment. By the time she was finished, Helen did indeed look like Cleopatra. Her wig was dark brown with a few gold highlights. Once she was wearing the brown contacts, she was also suddenly given license to wear twice as much eye makeup as usual. Mindy used a different color of foundation as well. Helen looked completely different.

At two o’clock, she was waiting for Dominic outside the fairgrounds. Helen had never felt as confident in her escort garb as she did that afternoon. She was so empowered. She was positive she made the people standing within a fifteen-foot radius feel the vibe.

Then all at once, Dominic, Laura, and Mark appeared near the entrance. She waved to Dominic and he approached her.

“Is that you, Vera?” he asked after she kissed his cheek.

“Yeah, of course. What is it? You look surprised,” she said, taking off her sunglasses and looking at him roguishly.

“You just look totally different from before,” he said.

“I was blonde on Valentine’s Day, wasn’t I?” she flirted, not daring to look at Mark and Laura. She didn’t understand why Mark played Dominic's game. Wasn’t he better than Dominic? Wasn’t he brave enough to ask her directly? And not only that, but it really looked like Dominic hadn’t lied when he said that Mark and Laura were dating. They had to be a couple, since they were still together, right?

“Don’t women usually go darker in the winter and lighter in the summer?” Dominic asked coyly.

Yeah, he would be the type of guy who knew that. Blah… he probably even read chick magazines. Helen wanted to shoot herself. Somehow in the rush of preparation, she had forgotten he was the devil.

“Normally,” she said, still not losing the gleam of trouble in her eye. “But I didn’t want your sister to think that you’d stopped dating ‘thrilling’ women,” Helen said before she turned around and greeted Mark and Laura. “Laura! Darling, you look wonderful. That diet of yours is a miracle worker. You look simply radiant." Then she took Mark’s hand and shook it, trying her best to make her handshake feel different from ‘Helen’s.' “It’s nice to see you again,” she said to Mark, right before she turned around and poured all her attention on Dominic again. “One hundred dollars an hour,” was what she whispered to herself as she took his arm.

Dominic didn’t seem like his ordinary tricky self as he took her around the carnival. They went past a petting zoo and a merry-go-round, but he didn’t seem interested in anything until they got to the games where you got to shoot things. Mark stood beside him and they both shot twenty rounds at paper targets. Helen half expected one of them to be a good shot, but both of them hit nothing but air.

Afterward, Dominic said to Mark and Laura, “I’m going to take Vera to get something to eat. Why don’t you both go… pet some goats or something?" He didn’t even wait for their answer before he put his hand over Helen’s and headed toward one of the hotdog carts.

“Are you really that anxious to lose them?” Helen asked as she turned into the heartless wench she had transformed into the last time they were alone.

“You didn’t call,” he said sourly.

“Mark never called and made a request for me,” Helen said sternly. “I thought that was the deal. Besides, I don’t phone clients and ask them to take me out.”

“Why not?” he demanded.

“I’m here for you—for your needs. I don’t have needs when I go on a date with you. I am here for your comfort and pleasure only. I do not phone and ask to fulfill your needs. You call me. Even you should understand that much about all this.”

“Well, I thought I did. I’m probably just being an idiot, but going out with you is a lot different than dating the girls I know,” he said, slipping his sunglasses over his rogue eyes. “You’re not afraid to show affection in public. You aim to make others jealous. I never saw a girl do that before. Even today.”

“That’s because that’s what you want,” Helen said. “I’m good at reading people.”

“Then you’re the only person who’s good at reading me.”

“You can’t think of me that way,” Helen said as he steered her away from the food carts and toward the grassy park.

“The thing is, I want to take you on a real date; get to know you and you get to know me. If it’s money you want, I understand that a woman has to make her living somehow. I’m really well off, I could give you a bank account with plenty of money. If you’ll give yourself the chance to get to know me,” Dominic said.

Helen couldn’t believe he said that. It had to be a trick. Mark and Laura were probably waiting in the bushes somewhere watching to see what would happen next.

“I don’t believe you. If you really wanted that with me, then you would have called me sooner. It’s June now, Dominic. Our last date was in February,” she said coldly.

“I didn’t realize I felt this way until I saw you standing there with your dark hair. Blondes never did turn me on,” he said, moving to touch her hair.

She slapped his hand away. If he touched her hair, he would feel it was a wig. “Like I’m going to fall for a cheap line like that! Exactly who do you think you’re talking to? Some country kid who just climbed out of the pumpkin patch?”

“You’re too good,” he said, contorting his mouth into something that almost looked like a smile.

Helen let go of his hand and pulled his sunglasses off his face. “Another thing is that a man who was truly sincere wouldn’t confess while wearing sunglasses. Nothing you do strikes me as the actions of a man who’s truly in love or even interested. You’re playing another warped little game with your sister and her boyfriend, aren’t you?”

“That’s what I thought before I saw you today,” he said wickedly. “Unfortunately, I have to pay off my sister before I can play the games I like. So for now, we’re playing her game and I paid you to play it,” he said, grabbing both Helen’s arms and pulling her close to him so that their noses almost touched.

“Okay, so tell me what you want me to do. I’m on your side.”

“You see Mark, over there. I need you to do something to make him change his mind about you. My sister wants to marry him, but he won’t consent because he says he can’t get you out of his mind and he hates the idea of being in love with someone as false as you. So, his attraction for you is keeping him from my sister—even though he doesn’t want to be with you either. Think you can do something about that?”

Helen was puzzled. “So you wanted me to come today looking... unattractive?”